Graceful Courage: A Venture in Christian Humanism by Roger Hazelton
Chapter 7: Graceful Courage
Grace makes us fall towards the heights. -- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
The preceding chapters have approached the subject of courage in deliberately human terms.
Resisting the temptation to "explain" it in either clinically precise or cosmically grandiose ways, we have called courage by many names in ways compatible with common sense. Maintaining this perspective has required that the sheer phenomenon of courage should be seen from more than one angle and without being forced into a single frame of understanding. Only so can we treat a theme that is almost infinitely varied by the changing contours of lived experience itself.
Hence courage has been termed a way of taking the human measure of one’s world, a kind of virtue necessary to becoming human, a resilient steadfastness before life’s hazards and setbacks.
Neither physical energy nor spiritual inspiration alone accounts for its presence, as it arises in the middle zone between bare survival and devotion to superior, self-surpassing values. It vibrates within the tension set up by fear and faith. Its resources come from contrary directions although they meet at that mysterious juncture called "the heart." Why not simply leave the matter there?
The reason why we cannot do so is already evident from the challenge issued in the previous chapter. Does not courage by its very presence suggest a "more-than" rather than a "nothing- but" reading of our humanity itself? In other words, can courage even be conceived apart from the conviction that here humanity is overreaching itself, harnessing possibility to actuality, moving slowly but surely toward its own fulfillment? Such a belief has always been a salient feature of humanistic thought. However, as we ask whence comes this power to produce as well as to endure change, we are led to think of a source of energy resembling what religions call God. Does faith in humankind imply a faith in God, or are these two faiths on a collision course with one another? That is the question posed by considering courage in fully human terms.
Courage Grounded in Grace
It was not a theologian but a novelist, Ernest Hemingway, who liked to define courage as "grace under pressure." Whatever he may have had in mind, Hemingway borrowed from religion a word used to describe God. The same word applies to human character, of course, especially in its most appealing and gallant aspects. Yet grace clearly embraces both meanings. A Godless humanity would be graceless too; the one word seeks to express what Karl Barth called the humanity of God.
So an Appalachian congregation sings "Amazing Grace," which its members know by heart, and a Roman Catholic worshiper prays "Hail, Mary, full of grace"; in each instance what is being said is that those qualities of generous and kindly good will that make and keep life human belong preeminently to God as well.
Grace, then, delineates a common bond, even a common ground, between what is known to he human and what is believed tof be divine. It is not an "either/or" word for enforcing what Sf ren Kierkegaard declared to be "the infinite qualitative distinction" between Creator and creature, but a "both/and" word of intimate relationship. Yet its primary, positive emphasis is surely placed upon God-in-action seeking out, surprising, saving creatures like ourselves.
Probably the best synonym for grace is "lovingkindness," by which the King James Version of the Bible translates the Hebrew chesed and the Greek charis -- given gratis with no strings attached, as abounding as it is amazing.
Small wonder that this accent on grace should be lifted up so eagerly when God is being praised or prayed to as the object of worship. However, it also greatly complicates the work of
theologians who must think clearly about God as the object of belief. For if we adopt such a human measure for our thought of God then how may we be sure that it is really God of whom we think? And how may grace be recognized if and when it appears on the human scene?
Therefore, as one might expect, theologians have discussed and debated the meaning of grace interminably during the long course of biblical and Christian thinking about God. One of the ironies of that history is the fact that disputes over God’s goodness should have so divided the faithful and disturbed the peace of the church. Legitimate differences of viewpoint are hardened into controversies over matters of undoubted importance to the faith; but how stale and
unprofitable all this arguing over grace has become!
But we are not thereby exempted from the task of thinking carefully about grace, for the old antitheses and arguments are still with us, virulent as ever. Is grace predestinating or only permissive? Is it irresistible when offered or can it be refused? Is it all-sufficient or auxiliary to human effort? These and similar questions show how easily thinking about grace falls into
"either/or" formats in which words are taken as the things they represent, as if one had to
choose between contradictory views with no hope of any reasonable resolution. This hardening process sets the stage for what can only be "a dialogue of the deaf" carried on by groups of
thinkers each pushing their own truth, quite unable to hear what other groups are saying, making the questions fit the answers already given.
In general, these debates revolve around the issue of God’s power -- its nature and extent and effects on human freedom. This, as we have seen, is most significant for understanding courage in relation to such themes as humility and obedience. It is possible that by concentrating upon courage some new light can be cast on these old antagonistic positions, however, with a view to their removal.
The place to begin, of course, is with those experiences of grace in freedom that provoke
feelings of wonder or gratitude in the first place. Sometimes when looking back on moments of unforseen ability to rise to a difficult occasion or to succeed where failure seemed inevitable, I may say, "I didn’t know I had it in me to do that." Here is an experience of grace, if you will, in its most ordinary, daily form. Instead of succumbing to the suffering brought on by illness I find in myself a quite astonishing will to live that brings me through crisis back to health. Or,
agitated by severe depression, I may catch a brief glimpse of hope in the smile of a friend that calms and steadies me, "restoring my soul." Or again, inured to being a nonachiever when thrown in competition with others, I discover that my real battle is with myself, which makes a manageable and auspicious difference. In such instances of new-found courage to survive or succeed, an unexpected factor enters into situations, one calculated to yield only
discouragement. Why not call it grace? Grace, that is, in the sense of enabling and resourceful energy coming from a source as much beyond as within myself.
But perhaps these experiences of heightened resolve or increased strength are not due to anything except my own natural forces; they may quite as well be traced to an influx of
adrenaline so that chemistry and not theology provides their explanation. What then? May not such experiences only confirm our good opinion of ourselves as normal, healthy human beings?
You remember William Ernest Henley’s often-quoted poem, Invictus:
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
Is this not simply a witness to that bulldog courage, "bloody but unbowed," determined to master fate by sheer force of will, relying therefore more on pride or chutzpah than on anything resembling faith ?
Yet notice that even Henley does not fail to mention "whatever gods may be," as if to bow in the direction of some energy source other than his personal resources. For it is after all the common testimony of men and women in every age that any experience of surmounting or subduing adverse circumstance carries with it a sure sense of surplus power not entirely their
own and for which one can only be somehow thankful. By whatever name it is called, God or fate or genetic constitution, it is something with which we have to do because it has to do with us, and it is something that is invoked precisely to account for the very fact of courage.
Long before the rise of modern medical technology doctors spoke of the vis medicatrix naturae, the healing strength of nature. It referred to nature’s way of establishing a turning point or
breakthrough toward recovery at the very crisis of an illness, which led to the belief in a power not ourselves that makes for health. Nature is not always so benign, to be sure, and yet its curative powers, favoring growth and fostering health, are by no means to be discounted. Thus it would seem that what religious people name as grace or God is not utterly foreign to general, common experience, however variously described.
Names may not greatly matter; what does matter is that our thought should not lose its moorings in lived and shared reality. Paul’s words, "I, yet not I," chosen to describe his own experience of grace, might well serve in accounting for courage too. If I can be said to act bravely or
honorably under pressure, it is entirely right that my act should be affirmed as mine by myself and others. I do well to be assured of the self-respect and dignity that courage exhibits so remarkably. And I do even better to be grateful to "whatever gods may be" for those available means and reserves that make courage possible to me and others like me.
Paul’s "paradox of grace" holds a significant truth. "I" and "not I" carry equal weight, each necessary to the meaning of the other. If one has to make a choice one must choose both.
Theologically speaking, grace does not exclude freedom but includes and implies it; freedom does not repel or reject grace but relies upon it, when it is most itself. The great Augustine, who is sometimes cited as the doctor of grace, wrote pages and pages of prickly prose to show that grace is liberating and assisting, rather than supplanting or overwhelming human energies and ends. At the same time he insisted that we do not acquire grace by freedom, but freedom by grace -- something that can assuredly be said of courage too.
There are lesser theologians whose opinion of human powers and values is so low that they cannot accept this Augustinian conviction. Either unable or unwilling to grant humanhood its essential rightness in the sight of God, they persist in setting grace and freedom over against each other as if a great gulf loomed between them. They forget the salutary truth in Robert Frost’s "You can’t trust God to be unmerciful." And by the same token they do not know what to make of courage, taken simply as it stands and shows itself. A wiser, more ample theology would accept the general proposition that grace does not destroy but perfects our human nature.
There is a wideness in God’s mercy, as a familiar hymn sings.
Samuel Terrien, in The Elusive Presence, voices this same conviction with singular
suggestiveness. Writing on Psalm 51, Terrien regards its prayer "Create in me a clean heart, O God" as a significant breakthrough theologically. He comments on the passage:
He [the psalmist] viewed the holy no longer as the mysterium fascinans et tremendum, forever exterior to man as the numinous force which attracts and repels him at the same time, but as the source of vitality which sharpens conscience, activates the will to shun evil, and stirs the imagination to do the good. A world is aborning also within man.
Creation may be microcosmic as well as macrocosmic. Presence and spirit coalesce to animate the new being.l
If one were to try to capture in a single phrase the active attitude of the psalmist’s prayer,
prayerful courage would be the right term. No passage in the whole psalter is more burdened by consciousness of ingrained, "original" sin, and yet the prayer for a new and right spirit places sin in a quite different perspective. The prayer indeed changes the situation altogether, as sincere praying always does, for it declares the speaker’s ready willingness to be changed and the new world stirring within the heart.
Power in God
Returning to the theme of power, how are we to understand the kind of power that is implied in exercising courage? Plainly, no real sense can he made of such behavior without introducing the element of power to some degree: power to make possibilities actual, to choose and do what is chosen, to enter the course of events as a cause and not merely as an effect. But such power is not unlimited or absolute; its very exercise depends upon the recognition of centers of power other than my own within the total situation in which I act, so that my action although free also exhibits those constraints and conditions placed upon my freedom. These limits cannot be
disregarded without eventual disaster. The modern world should have learned by now the lesson that unbounded, open-ended power is a mirage that corrupts its instigators and a nightmare to its victims.
Must we not take the same view with regard to the sort of power that is attributed to God? By choosing to think of God in terms of grace we have already rejected any idea that divine power is sheer unqualified omnipotence. Not everything that happens can rightly be assigned to the working of an Almighty Will. The power experienced in grace can hardly be the sort which in human beings is called sin -- overbearing, all-coercing, self-asserting. No, God’s power, being gracious not gratuitous, works suaviter in modo, fortiter in re -- sweetly and strongly, as the theological formula goes—by invitation and not compulsion, as indeed all high religion has repeatedly affirmed.
This throws a new and very different light upon the old question about the power of God, as it asks not how much but what kind of power may be termed divine. Obviously to deny all power to God amounts to a refusal to regard God as real in any proper sense. A powerless God would be no God at all, religious faith would be only a useless passion, and theology no more than beating about the bush of futile imaginings. But the kind of power that belongs to God according to our faith is that which works by persuasion, not by compulsion. It is far better
symbolized by the Virgin than by a dynamo, as Henry Adams wrote. Such power draws and invites but it does not coerce. And what is still more to the point of our present need, the divine power is nonviolent, achieving its ends by peaceable and patient means
How far this faith-truth is from the obstinate, desperate notion, still inserted into legal
documents, that an "act of God" is what cannot otherwise be accounted for, the inexplicable and catastrophic happening! No honor is paid to God by holding this power-idol responsible for explosions and earthquakes, massacres and shipwrecks. On the contrary, it is a sound
theological principle that what is deemed blameworthy in human action ought not to be thought praiseworthy in God.
The most reliable clue to God’s kind of power is that seen to be at work in human love at its sweetest and strongest. A lover cherishes the loved one for the beloved’s own sake, exulting in the otherness of the other, letting the other be herself or himself. When the ego falls in love it abandons egoism’s claims and so-called rights. We might say that the center of emotional
gravity has shifted so that possessing and being possessed become interchangeable in the shared mutuality of belonging to one another. This is an awkward way of saying what love itself
always finds warmer, brighter words for, to be sure.
The leitmotif of Christian faith is indubitably the confidence that God is love. However, this good news is likely to come as bad news to those who do not realize, or have forgotten, the authentic power of loving. For love, both human and divine, is not an "anything goes"
permissiveness; it clearly has built-in constraints and warning signals of its own which we disregard at our peril. Following love’s leading requires keeping faith with that which inspires and fortifies love. Among other things it means being willing to be changed by "the expulsive power of a new affection," as old habits are broken and the grip of bondage to self is loosened.
That power can be resisted or refused, of course, with what may be ominous results. We all know that the struggle to love and be loved goes on amidst traps and temptations, so that courage must be its watchword always. Was this not perhaps what Paul meant in writing the Corinthians that love bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things?
Such loving courage may not constitute a simple answer to the woes and wrongs that beset our world, but it can serve as a powerful antidote to them. That is why it is worthy of being called more than human, as it goes against the grain of what is only human. Dante’s poetic intuition discovered love in the motion of the sun and other stars; Francis of Assisi recognized love in the nearer tokens of our common creaturehood; and Jesus of Nazareth more than once found love’s emblems in birds of passage as in lilies of the field. All these, and more too, signify God to us, as Francis sang delightedly.
And what shall we say of the love that so powerfully strengthens and sweetens "this mortal life also," in Luther’s words? It can, and does, make a heart of flesh out of a heart of stone. It walks the second unrequired mile in guarding the beloved’s freedom. And it makes the first move
without being shown the reasons for giving itself, so that its generosity may even seem a little crazy, going well beyond what prudent self-protection would advise. Only power, and power of unparalleled virtue, is able to take such risks and make such strides of courage.
Here of course we are speaking of grace under its other name of love. And now the old
theological words return to firm up our thought. Grace is prevenient, going before, dependably there in every enterprise or encounter, working already with us for our good. It is efficacious;
not to be earned or paid for by "good deeds" or by any other quid pro quo. No matter how sanctified religiously, grace acts beyond and above the law. And grace is cooperating; it accompanies and assists us, eliciting not compliance but consent, greatening our courage precisely by gentling it, adapting itself to our condition while accepting no condition as final.
A life lived in the ambiance of grace is not under the control of an exterior, superior power.
That is not the intention behind Simon Weil’s memorable sentence, "Grace makes us fall towards the heights.’’ Or it should not be, at any rate, for Weil was so attracted by the contrast between gravity and grace that she tended to make it into a contradiction. As gravity seeks the lowest level by a law of nature, she suggested, so grace raises what it touches to the highest level by the law of God. But she evidently forgot an important truth -- that while the rule of gravity is all-compelling and passionless, the beckoning of grace is strangely selective and alluring. Grace is as much a fact of our existence as gravity is, and therefore we are constantly being drawn in contrary directions; that is true. According to Weil’s view, our only right response to grace can be through what she calls "decreation," making ourselves as small and light as possible, stripping down the self to nothingness so that God may fill the vacuum that remains. The route she recommends is that of ecstatic asceticism which has always been
followed by extreme mystics who want to get lost in God. However, it finds little if any warrant in either the Gospel or in Christian common sense. There we come upon an equally strenuous but paradoxically humbler view. Life itself is a gift, a trust, a charge to keep. Let it be held then reverently and joyously, invested and reinvested, not abused or wasted. The right response to grace is gratitude, for what do we have that we have not received?
A life so lived, according to the power working in us, will proceed on the premise that it is lent to be spent, given to be given away. "Freely you have received; freely give." Oliver Twist
begging for more is hardly the model of such a life; its type instead is found among those whose cup runs over with the gift of grace. And living out of the overflow has social consequences, for the gift includes a task. As Saint Augustine wrote, while the love of God comes first in the order of enjoining, the love of the neighbor comes first in the order of doing. Both loves are made one by the power of grace.
Wrestling With God
From his Samoan sickbed Robert Louis Stevenson spoke this unorthodox benediction: "Now may the grace of courage and of gaiety and the quiet mind, together with all such blessedness as